‘A Tale for the Time Being,’ by Ruth Ozeki

By LESLEY DOWNER

May 10, 2013

Nao, a 16-year-old schoolgirl, is in a cafe in Tokyo, writing in her diary. She is, she declares, a “time being,” with all the ambiguity that phrase implies. Many months later, after Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, a Japanese-American novelist named Ruth, living on an island off the coast of British Columbia, finds a barnacle-encrusted freezer bag washed up on the beach. It contains, it appears, a copy of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and a broken watch, along with some letters. But Proust’s book is no more than a cover. Inside is Nao’s diary, written in purple ink.

Whenever the word “time” comes up — “wasting time,” “about time,” “in time” — the reader must stop and think about the many angles of approach to that subject in Ruth Ozeki’s delightful yet sometimes harrowing new novel, “A Tale for the Time Being.” Ozeki’s quirky and passionate first novel, “My Year of Meats,” introduced a Japanese-American television producer to a Japanese housewife; her second, “All Over Creation,” was set in rural Idaho. Now she sets out again to link two people on opposite sides of the Pacific.

Nao has spent most of her life in Sunnyvale, Calif., where her father was a Silicon Valley highflier. When the dot-com bubble burst, he lost his job and his money, forcing his family to return to Tokyo and a cramped two-room apartment at the wrong end of town, a situation that, as Nao puts it in her irreverent style, “totally sucked.” An unhappy schoolgirl who questions everything, Nao writes down whatever enters her head, making her diary read like an extended series of e-mails. When her great-grandmother and a fellow nun come on a visit from their Zen temple, she records her response: “Yo, Dad! There’s two bald midgets in pajamas here to see you.”

In her new Japanese school, Nao is an outsider, violently bullied by her classmates until she’s covered in cuts and bruises. Her father’s wounds are more deeply hidden: he lies to the family, saying he’s found a new job, then sits in a park all day. Finally, he jumps in front of a train, but even his suicide attempt is unsuccessful. Nao also wants to die, but first she intends to write the biography of the Buddhist great-grandmother, who claims to be 104 years old. Yet there’s another reason to relish her visit to the old woman’s temple near Sendai, on the coast north of Tokyo: learning a way to overcome obstacles and enemies by developing “supapawa” (superpowers) through Zen meditation.

Nao’s future reader, Ruth, has left Manhattan to live with her husband on the aptly named Desolation Sound in a community of refugees from the modern world. There she reads the diary slowly, at the same speed she imagines Nao wrote it, and gradually the teenager’s world impinges more and more on Ruth’s. The watch turns out to be not broken but merely in need of winding, and when Ruth translates the characters engraved on the back — “sky” and “soldier” — it’s clear that it must have belonged to a kamikaze pilot. At the mountain temple, Nao meets the ghost of that pilot, her great-uncle, and is given letters he sent from a training camp to her great-grandmother. “My being is attuned only to one thing,” he informed his mother, “the relentless rhythm of time, marching toward my death.”

Many of the elements of Nao’s story — schoolgirl bullying, unemployed suicidal “salarymen,” kamikaze pilots — are among a Western reader’s most familiar images of Japan, but in Nao’s telling, refracted through Ruth’s musings, they become fresh and immediate, occasionally searingly painful. Ozeki takes on big themes in “A Tale for the Time Being” — not just the death of individuals but also the death of the planet. In doing so, she ranges widely, drawing in everything from quantum mechanics and the theory of infinite possibilities in an infinite number of universes to the teachings of the 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji. There’s even a crow with possibly magical powers. All are drawn into the stories of two “time beings,” Ruth and Nao, whose own fates are inextricably bound.

A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

By Ruth Ozeki

422 pp. Viking. $28.95.

Lesley Downer is a British journalist who writes about Asia. Her latest book is a novel, “Across a Bridge of Dreams.”